Al Pacino's Producer Defends the Poor Taste of Old Men [Kicking The Bucket List]
If the long national nightmare that is Al Pacino's career decline wasn't set to continue later this year with his cop-schlocky Robert De Niro/Jon Avnet reteaming Righteous Kill, then maybe we would have simply Lysol-ed away the scourge of 88 Minutes after its opening weekend and left it at that. But seeing as even Pacino's own producer has seen fit to pile on in Patrick Goldstein's latest column, we think a prolonged period of mourning is in order after the jump.
Clearly having filibustered enough last week on Letterman, Pacino declined Goldstein's interview requests. But inveterate B-movie godfather Avi Lerner wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to spin:
"I like [88 Minutes] — it's exactly the movie I wanted it to be," he says. "The critics can say what they want. That's the great thing about America. Everyone gets to have their opinion. It hurts when people call and say the reviews were terrible. But I don't read reviews. I hardly read anything." (Lerner is famous for not reading scripts either, though he insists he read 88 Minutes.) ...
When I asked if the scathing reviews for 88 Minutes could damage [Righteous Kill]'s commercial chances, he joked: "Hey, it's two different movies, two different sets of 17 producers." Turning serious, he said: "They are still two icons. If you get out of Beverly Hills, to Ventura Boulevard, every person you ask will say — we want to see them together. Just like people did for Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List. And they're even older!"
Oh, now we get it: We just have to "get out of Beverly Hills" and into the parallel universe where the hoi polloi eat up hammy, old-man condescension like sweets. At these prices, though (Goldstein puts Pacino's 88 Minutes price tag at $9 million), we can't imagine many souls that wouldn't be for sale. Alas, we'll always have Heat.
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If the long national nightmare that is Al Pacino's career decline wasn't set to continue later this year with his cop-schlocky Robert De Niro/Jon Avnet reteaming Righteous Kill, then maybe we would have simply Lysol-ed away the scourge of 88 Minutes after its opening weekend and left it at that. But seeing as even Pacino's own producer has seen fit to pile on in 
